[OT from cottage renovations]

one does not wish to complain, but for the longest time now the weather seems to have been rain, more rain, and nothing but.  no doubt later in the year we'll be wishing equally fervently for its return but at this point things have gotten rather soggy around here and we'd readily trade some of this precipitation for, say, a bit of sunlight. 

today provided an opportunity to come home on the train before sundown, much to be preferred to taking the night's last subway.  yet another front had come through, drenching the place but giving the air that cool, crisp and clear edge that lets you know that at least for a while the oak pollen has been washed away. 

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the Circle

there was just enough light to see these incompletely fallen raindrops, pausing in their descent to linger on a neighbour's peonies -- a most excellent choice. 

( +1 )

[OT from cottage renovations]

thanks to el reg for picking up this important news item: "Jedi officers enlist with Scottish police" from the BBC. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

there are times when goin' daffy makes perfect sense.  a week at the 7^th District police station resulted in a successful field deployment for the first part of the city to cut over to the new system but it made for long hours.  the weekend provided chances to ramp down to normal circadian rhythms and to see what had been going on -- a great deal, as it turned out -- while my attention was directed elsewhere. 

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the Circle

this picture took a day to get.  I had seen it on Saturday just as the light shifted away from this composition so there was nothing to do but try again 23¾ hours later.  a thin margin is better when it's positive rather than negative, and it's easier to wait for a day than for a year for lighting and conditions to converge again (this I know from having found it out the hard way). 

the glow of this daffodil in the afternoon light and the combination of shadow and texture was worth the wait. 

here's the same flower, seen in context with crabapple budding overhead and cottage façades in the background. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

quick and simple diagnostic tool: the Conficker Eye Chart. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

two views of the same small flower, found this afternoon on the Center Street side of the Hall grounds. 

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M^cCathran Hall Grounds

[OT from cottage renovations]
[crossposted to hummingbirders]

it's been a long time, too long, since they cleared out last year.  with each year's seasonal departure it seems like they take a part of me away with them; I'm not really whole until they return. 

already the northward migration is underway; soon they will be passing through.  some may even stay over if conditions appear suitable. 

as always, the tracking map over at hummingbirds.net is updated daily and is well worth watching.  in a way it makes the waiting easier, though the lag between first report in the region and first spotting here is always far longer than it has any right to be. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

finally the days are long enough for Grovers alighting from the train at the end of the street to get a chance to see this place before sundown.  with the vernal equinox behind us the extended light is starting to do all of us more than a little good. 

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the Circle

it rained last night and throughout the day.  my good fortune in having been able to catch the early train meant that on getting home there was just enough time to change into jeans, grab the camera and head out into the ebbing ambient light to share these glimpses of what the season has been up to. 

---

Daffodil

as usual these thumbnails are too small for much of anything other than to let you know where to click. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

this time of the year the Grove has a certain tendency for cold days like this, characterised by a thick overcast that sets itself in and occasionally crosses over into an intermittent rain useful only for putting a clammy edge onto the damp chill, mocking last week's foretaste of spring with the reality of the few weeks that remain before that promise can be fulfilled. 
good days for staying in with computers and cats, useless for much of anything else. 

even so, there's no need to let one's spirits be dampened by the seasonal reality; not when the indifferent light is enough to reveal some of what's already happening out there. 

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Jackson Park

( .. +3 .. )

these are the descendants (or, if you prefer, this year's transformational successors) of the owl babies featured in this space on 18 February 2006. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

any way you look at them these snowdrops are easy on the eyes: 

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East Woods

Galanthus nivalis

as it turns out, the approach can be applied just as well to crocus and winter aconite. 

Woodward Park

Crocus

Maple Road at Center Street

Eranthis hyemalis

[OT from cottage renovations]

the past couple of days have provided a wonderful taste of what the spring will bring, but despite the relative optimism of the current ten day forecast there is still a ways to go before winter is finished with us. 

with that in mind it's not completely clear whether the following images from 31 January are a look forward or backwards.  one hopes for the latter but would do well to prepare for either outcome. 

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the Circle

as January turned to February the snow on the ground went through a couple of days worth of partial-thaw-and-hard-freeze cycles.  treacherous as the surfaces were for walking, their effect on light was well worth going out to appreciate - luminance from below rather than above made for a different way to view otherwise familiar surroundings. 

ice at sunrise

the best lighting was to be found just at dawn so for both days of the weekend a rousting of self up and out was necessary. 

Howard Park

by afternoon things had gotten marginally warmer out there and further wandering turned up the curious sight of these sycamore seed pods. 

sycamore seed pods

what makes them come out like this? 
the first one gives the impression of a hole somehow melted through the ice from underneath whereas the second suggests an impact, perhaps as the pod falls from the tree branch far above, thudding onto and into the ice. 

the real attraction of the ice sheets came from their interplay with texture and light: 

but best of all was the chance to get back inside and restore thermal equilibrium. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

it is said of this month that it comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb, a process that was encapsulated into a single week. 

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the Circle

we started off with temperatures in the 20°f range and two days of snow, as caught on the porch cam:

by Saturday the temperature had hit the 70°f mark but the snowdrops were still holding out in the Circle ...

Galanthus Nivalis

Jackson Park

... and over in Jackson Park the crocus meadow had come into its brief annual existence. 

Crocus

the Grove's other crocus meadow is/was on a privately owned lot where construction has taken place over the course of the past year; the attendant moving and scraping of soil might have obliterated it.  it's been a while since I've been over there but will take a look later today to see how -- or if -- it's coming along. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

(note: these images are from three weekends ago)

if the images that follow seem repetetive I offer no excuse, there are some of which I just can't get enough. 

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Church grounds

when the leaves fall from a tree, how many will land upright? 
and of those, how many will have light passing through them just when somebody happens by to see it? 

replication

the outline of the leaf's vein structure replicates the shape of an entire tree, smaller in scale but no less perfect in design (is this not the essence of fractal?) or better yet, providing an example in decaying cellulose of how one might execute the image in stained glass. 

sometimes shadow falls onto a leaf rather than through it; either way there's still a host of detail to observe and appreciate.  click on through and you'll see even more. 

leaf shadow

[OT from cottage renovations]

herewith a shameless plug for a family enterprise: follow the WVR Team in this year's Ice Alaska competition.  the team blog is syndicated to LJ as wvrmultiblock, you can add it to your flist or look over their shoulders from the porch cam, to which site 23 has been added as a special guest cam. 

I guess it means you can now see Alaska from the porch ...

[OT from cottage renovations]

after a sustained period of extreme stand-down on discretionary expense I'm now in a position to start dealing in a modest way with some of the long-deferred items on the replace list, high on which are three computers.  I can't get to them all at once but one needs to be replaced immediately (the Wonder Boy's laptop), another needs to be replaced soon (the late lamented Vaio) and the third can eke out a bit more service life but the finite service life of rotating electrical components is starting to catch up with it and I doubt it will last the year. 

the problem? 
there's no way any of these will happen until Windows Vista goes hasta-la-vista-baby.  I'm not the only one in this situation - Don Reisinger described the situation in a recent cnet column "I'll wait for Windows 7 before buying a new computer".  one wonders how many of us are in this particular boat and what the cumulative effect has been on PC makers. 
 

one piece of business that won't be coming back to them is the Office suite -- the '07 release was just as obnoxious as Vista and had the effect of causing me to convert to Open Office, this after having consistently used MS applications since before Windows even came out. 

[ot from cottage renovations]

(from an email sent this morning, commenting on this image -- spend a little time with it to see just how much detail it contains)

>
> for all that I busy myself with computers and networks,
> control systems and abstractions of levels of data,
> there's still a part of me that is subject to serious
> temporal displacement.  going through some quantity
> of old photographs, or tracking down something in old
> newspaper holdings - it all has the same effect. 
> I return to our present time slightly dazed and blinking
> as if stepping outside from a dark room. 
>
> it can be quite disorienting. 
> 

[OT from cottage renovations]

it's pushing midnight on this cold winter night and moonrise is hours away.  there's just enough haze to scatter light coming up from the region, giving the sky the texture of velvet and leaving it a dark but slightly muddy shade of grey -- perhaps that of wet slate -- tinged with lighter bands down near the horizon. 

the view from upstairs is high above all that and features most prominently the tall oaks: the darkness of trunk and limb, bough and branch all leafless and stark against the deep but lighter sky, a contrast made more intense by the gaps torn in the canopy by the loss of some of the larger trees over the past few months. 

in the branches of the largest of the trees can be seen tiny but intense points of light, like jewels caught in a net.  starlight brings a raw clarity to the scene: over such distances nothing remains of its heat and the air outside doesn't seem to be any warmer at this end of the journey than anywhere else along the long path the light has taken to contribute to the cold nocturnal composition. 

one curls into the blankets for warmth while keeping both eyes open to catch these details of the season's most subtle display. 

[OT from cottage renovations]

Rilke wrote:
>
> Now let us welcome the New Year,
> Full of things that have never been. 
>

[OT from cottage renovations]

how seasonal it is for one's computational activities to be so pleasantly interrupted by carolers in the Circle.  Grove kids (and their parents) are webcam-savvy so the holiday music was interspersed with queries as to whether the assembled singers would be visible on the porch cam. 

not in ambient light, that was certain, but it took only a few seconds to bring tripod and photoflood out onto the porch for their online delectation.  and yours. 

there's nothing better for a cold winter night than warm holiday wishes, theirs to me and mine in turn to you. 

[OT from cottage renovations]
[selected images crossposted to texture]

it's been cold and I still haven't completely shaken this low grade crud, so other than going to and from work I've been staying indoors.  today was another day that followed the same pattern until a glance out the back showed that something interesting was going on out there: 

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what is this thing?

(  ice shortcake - homage to Andy Goldsworthy  )

[OT from cottage renovations]

one of the best things about Thanksgiving is the leftovers, not all of which need be culinary in nature. 

for the past several years I have observed a Thanksgiving jointly with friends here in the Grove.  distributed mode cooking makes for a better allocation of tasks and facilities in a way that just makes the day goes better, and entails a certain amount of going back and forth that affords the opportunity to see the Grove during daylight, a pleasure that lately has become too rare a treat. 

this were taken that day; a variety of circumstances have contributed to the delay in posting. 

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the Circle

Clematis virginiana

Grove Avenue (Chestnut Road side)

another example in a different location, looking down rather than up. 

Clematis virginiana